Charitable Giving and Non-Expert Leadership
Destruction and Creation in the Institutions
This time of year many givers are hustling to make final donations before the calendar year, and its tax write-offs, conclude. As with so much that can be bought, you get what you pay for with your donations. Many of the institutions which surround us we have bought and paid for, directly or indirectly with our charitable giving. Are they serving the purpose we wish them to?
If I understand Catholic social teaching correctly, solidarity and subsidiarity are two of its important principles and relate to charitable giving as much as to other forms of service. Solidarity binds us together into communities and requires that we care for one another. Subsidiarity insists that the activity of caring for each other is best engaged in at the local level—initiatives and decisions should happen at the lowest feasible level.
What does this look like in practice? Probably not by attempting to care for the poor through large international organizations which, even if you presume they are well intentioned, are nevertheless likely to be poorly positioned to understand all-important local conditions.
But the question I have in mind is how an individual might tithe or donate to charitable causes or organizations while observing the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity? The question arises because of my sense that there are many people who have given much. But despite their support, the institutions which receive their generosity regularly, perhaps even intentionally, subvert their supporters’ wishes and charitable intent.
Charitable giving should accomplish two things. 1) Deny yourself the use and benefit of the money you give. Like the sabbath in which one willingly gives up the gains from a day of labor, it is a form of self-sacrifice and considered in a vacuum, burning the money rather than giving it would achieve the same benefit. 2) Purchase the means for benevolent institutions, individuals, or activities to perform their work. I’d propose that charitable giving is at its best when it combines these two objects: you have given up the personal use of your money and given it to an individual, institution, or activity you know well and can ensure is doing something good. If you can’t ensure it is doing good, then you really might as well just burn the money or keep it.
And here’s the rub. How many of us give to large institutions which have almost no accountability to the giver or which actively work against our own principles and ideals? Nevertheless, we give because we’re supposed to give. We’ve been raised that way and trained by various social pressures to give in a certain way. And despite years of giving by thousands or millions of people, the institutions still do what they do.
Let me use an example which you can translate to other religions, institutions, and causes as you will. Take a Catholic family which homeschools its children. How much of their tithe goes toward diocesan education initiatives? Let’s agree that they are likely benefitting spiritually from sacrificing their money thereby satisfying the first of our two objects of giving. But what about the second object whereby the funds you sacrifice go toward building or doing something you know to be good? At least some portion of the example family’s money goes toward diocesan education initiatives in which, for some reason, they have chosen not to participate. There could be any number of reasons for this. Perhaps they’re not participating because, despite their tithe, they could never afford tuition at the private Catholic school. Only wealthy non-Catholics can afford that—many such cases around the country. Or perhaps it’s because they think or know that the diocesan schools are terrible, or unfaithful, or unsafe. Or perhaps they have spent too much time reading Adam’s Curse and object to the homogenizing secularism of the hidden curriculum implicit in our post-industrial institutional schooling whether it has a thin veneer of performative Catholicism on top or not. We can imagine that the homeschooling family might object to their funds being used to secure the services of superintending Doctors of Education from anti-Catholic state institutions; they might object to infantilizing the liturgy, disenchanting rituals, aesthetic impoverishment, and purchasing secular curricula; or they might simply object to their funds going toward maintaining a decades-long tradition of failed evangelism and apostacy.
Who knows?
The reason I flesh out this example is to ask whether the many families like the one in our example, are getting the institutions they are paying for? And another impolite question: if we don’t like the institutions, why do we keep funding them?
One answer you sometimes hear in various forms essentially reduces to an appeal to authority. In religious contexts, this shows up as the call to obedience. In secular contexts, it’s the appeal to expertise. You don’t want to send a portion of your money to fund diocesan education programs, or dubious international “relief” initiatives, or better yet, whatever marketing department in Rome cooked up the Luce figurine? Lack of docility verging on disobedience. For the secular, this shows up as one of our new secular sins: disobedience to the credentialed class. The experts know what to do with your money and the institutions it funds better than you do and there is something wrong with you if you object to how your money is spent.
The administrative state shows up in philanthropy as a kind of neo-clericalism. You must give your money to the experts (clerical or otherwise) and they will tell you what institutions or services you need. Doubt them or withhold your funds and you are disobedient. I fear that many have become too comfortable relinquishing their agency and responsibility in the face of this appeal to authority. Parents will always have a fundamental responsibility to their children and no expert or cleric can remove it.
What to do?
Stop funding the programs and institutions which you don’t want and which in many cases don’t want you. Next, build and fund the institutions you want. This is simple but difficult for two reasons: 1) The small givers (who are a rich source of ideas and energy) are organized through the existing institutions and their funds are only significant enough to make a difference when massed together. Without independent leadership to galvanize giving potential outside the sclerotic anti-institutions of our day, the status quo remains. 2) The large givers all have institutional gift officers working them hard to shape their giving toward the existing institutions’ desired ends. Again, the solution is simple, but difficult to organize. It starts when we stop giving to groups that hate us and don’t do good work. If enough of us did this the institutions would either fail, (which would be great) or reform and become useful (which would be great).
The remaining difficulty is finding capable leadership to galvanize significant giving toward good projects. The good news here is that a return to the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity lowers the barrier to entry significantly. You don’t have to replace the massive institutions, just avoid them. Decentralization allows for much smaller scale projects which can be supported by local communities. As folks take on these projects (homeschooling, co-ops, etc.) the legacy anti-institutions either become irrelevant, or learn how they can support. Other examples include small scale independent institutes like St. Martin’s Academy in Kansas which, while a Catholic school, was funded, built, and operated entirely without institutional Catholic support. Its existence shows the opportunity for lay, non-expert leadership to build independent organizations which indirectly pressure the existing institutions to behave or fade into irrelevance.
In case I have not been clear, mine is not an argument for simple deconstruction. If bad organizations funded by good people fail, all the better. But this is an effort to encourage giving that corresponds with the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity and for non-expert, lay leaders to take courage and lead. Stop funding institutions that you don’t want. Start funding the ones you do. If they don’t exist, go build them. We should strive to become patrons and champions of beneficial institutions and efforts rather than remain wards of the ones we’ve inherited.
